AS BIG AS THE WEST

Richly detailed life of Granville Stuart (1834–1918), whose adventures on the northern frontier rivaled those of better-known figures such as William Cody.

Stuart, write Milner and O’Connor (History/Arkansas State Univ.; co-editors: The Oxford History of the American West, 1994), was a good record-keeper in adulthood, amassing a vast archive of letters, diaries and other documents to aid him when it came time to write his memoir. Yet his early years are something of a blank. For instance, he claimed to have been born in Clarksburg, Va. (now West Virginia), whereas the event took place across a county line—an emendation that perhaps “represented some enhancement to his family’s status,” though we will never know. After a boyhood on the Iowa prairie, Stuart traveled west to the California goldfields, where he established patterns that would last through much of his life. Wealth constantly eluded him, though in time he became rich. He also became a careful observer of the scene and, though not without qualification, a defender of Native American people, recognizing early on that they were being displaced from their ancestral grounds and “decimated by the massive numbers of outsiders who swarmed into their homelands.” Indeed, after moving to Montana, Stuart married a Shoshone woman, even as the influx of whites into the region brought disapproval of once-common mixed marriages and mixed-race children. Stuart’s records of life in the mining camps and ranch country of Montana, noting ethnic relations, incidents of vigilantism and other frontier realities, are important sources for historians. Milner and O’Connor’s biography lends specificity to them and fills in some gaps, particularly ones that Stuart, late in life and now a diplomat serving in South America, chose to leave deliberately.

A welcome addition to the literature of the old Northwest.